Putting Terror Out of Business
Eight Lives Down: The World's Most Dangerous Job in the World's Most Dangerous Place
By Chris Hunter
Delacorte, $26, 351 pp.
Brotherhood of Warriors: Behind Enemy Lines with a Commando in One of the World's Most Elite Counterterrorism Units
By Aaron Cohen
Ecco, $25.95, 273 pp.
"Whatever the rights and wrongs of this war, it would be a tragedy to fail [the Iraqi people] now, simply because we all grew tired of trying."
--- Major Chris Hunter
Fans of combat memoirs and war reporting probably have more choices now than at any time since the aftermath of World War II in the late 1940s. For obvious reasons, most of the books are by and about Americans.
But two new memoirs by elite soldiers from U.S. military allies are especially revealing -- not only because they are terrific accounts of brave men fighting the good fight but also because each comes from a nation that has been on the frontlines of fighting terrorists since long before 2001.
The books – British army bomb specialist Chris Hunter's Eight Lives Down and former Israeli commando Aaron Cohen's Brotherhood of Warriors – take similar tough-minded attitudes about the need to resist jihadists, but the authors could hardly have come from more different places.
Hunter, the middle-class son of a WWII veteran who had flashbacks from watching Danger UXB on the BBC, essentially followed in his father's footsteps. Cohen, meanwhile, was a spoiled Hollywood rich kid who found his purpose in life after his movie producer stepfather sent him away to military school.
While Hunter has seen action in both Northern Ireland and Colombia, Eight Lives Down mostly recounts his time in Basra, Iraq, where he defused IEDs and hunted down the bombmakers (some of whom, he is sure, are supplied by Iran).
A likeable and engaging narrator, Hunter mixes the personal and professional in the classic tradition of such other British combat memoirs as legless WWII British fighter ace Douglas Bader's Fight for the Sky. Hunter is passionate about his mission but also honest about the toll his job takes on his family.
Eight Lives Down is at its best when the author recounts the horror and savagery of an implacable enemy who thinks nothing of slaughtering the innocent and leaving men like Hunter to clean up after them. Too often, rather than disarming a bomb, Hunter is called to the scene of a blast to conduct a forensic investigation while others assist the wounded and dying.
Hunter has no sympathy for the aims or imagined grievances of the enemy, whether it's radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Iranian-backed militia or Sunnis supplied by al Qaeda. His only goal is to put them out of business.
In a similar vein, Cohen begins Brotherhood of Warriors in the blood-soaked aftermath of one of Israel's worst suicide bomber attacks, the 1996 Dizengoff Mall massacre in Tel Aviv.
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